points of clarity
by blue-jean-serenades
Summary: And sometimes she feels lost, but whenever she does there is Simon, calling her name and beckoning her out of the darkness. Pre-BDM. Oneshot.


**Disclaimer: I love Firefly with a burning passion. If I owned it, it would not have been tragically canceled.****  
Anyway. Aside from the Winchester boys, River and Simon are my favorite TV sibs. I love River, and I love Simon, and I love River and Simon together, and I love that they are each other's everything. So this is just a little oneshot- my first time dabbling in the Firefly fandom, but certainly not my last. I also WILL update Glimpses... eventually. And I have my mind on more Firefly fics as well as another Winchester fic. (I'm writing more fanfic than actual original writing, these days. :P)**

Comments are love, as always.  


* * *

  
Sometimes she wishes she was numb.

The stars are spinning and the moon is waning and she's lying on the hard cold surface of Simon's table, stomach tying itself into knots and her doctor brother's medicine is supposed to make her _better better better _but all it does is make things hurt. Her thoughts are dancing wildly around her brain, tangling with each other until she can't tell up from down and maybe she isn't even here at all, maybe she is still back in the place with the needles and the _pain pain pain, _and this is all just a dream. River cannot tell, cannot quantify.

She wants to be numb, because the worst feeling in the world is knowing she is broken and being unable to fix it.

_Two by two, hands of blue_. An inexorable feeling of dread creeps up on her, like a terrible fish. There is nothing left in this empty worn-out shell, no _River _or _girl _just needles and bright lights and pain and chaos. The equation is unbalanced but a variable is missing, she cannot remember who she was or what she used to be only this broken creature that she is now, _hands of blue _and the world will burn, screaming someone is screaming—

"River! River, it's okay—shh, I'm here, it's okay…" The screaming is a high-pitched whine that pierces her eardrums, like sirens or alarms and she cannot think, _make it go away_ but then familiar doctor hands ground her back to reality and the screaming cuts off with a strangled noise. _Comfort brother_ _Simon_ pulls her towards him and hugs her gently, like she is glass that might shatter.

"Two by two…hands of blue…" River does not know what it is that she is chanting but all she can think is that they're everywhere, _two by two hands of blue_ will come for her and worlds will die screaming in fire and rain. "Two by two…hands of—hands of—"

"_Mei mei._" Simon's voice, desperate and pleading, cuts through the darkness, and suddenly River is back in reality again, hard and cold and white. She is on the floor now, and does not know how she got there. _Doctor brother Simon _is kneeling in front of her, gripping her arms, his soft-gentle eyes wide and panicked.

"Simon?" Her brain is rebelling. Cannot compute. _SimonSimonSimon. _"Simon, the equation is flawed. A variable is missing." She grabs his wrists, needing him to understand, but he won't, he can't, because she is to the sun and the stars as he is to the earth—so solid, so very grounded, only thinking in straight lines. River does not think in lines. She thinks in circles, round and looping, or irregular polygons. Always so many things at once, an ocean that threatens to overwhelm her. She used to be able to control it—but now she thinks everything, all at the same time, spinning and whirling and forever detached from what is and what is not. Dancing among the moon and the stars.

"River, what does that mean? Are you okay?"

She smiles. Laughs. Stares up at the ceiling, crisscrossed all over with squares—boring and two-dimensional, like people. Not like her. "I'm in perfect physical health," she whispers, not intending to be heard, but Simon hears her anyway.

"That's not what I'm talking about, _mei mei_."

She knows this. She's not stupid; her mind is still sharp, but the things that were once so easily communicated are jumbled, disordered, and not even Simon understands her now. "The girl is acceptable at the moment."

Her beautiful brilliant brother studies her, analytical, scrutinizing, his well-oiled medical gears whirring underneath the skin and the muscle and the tissue. It will not last for long. The machine will rust, the parts will clank away and die, and eventually brother doctor will return to the earth from which he was born. Wasted, like space trash, abandoned and left with nothing except empty promises and a girl who used to shine but now only burns, a black hole sucking away everything that is good.

"Broken," River whispers. "Broken, wasted, spent. You gave up everything you had to find me. You found me…broken."

Simon recoils. _No,_ he will say, she can see it on his lips, but no matter how far his denial reaches the truth will not change. River is damaged, defective product. But Simon will deny it.

"River," he says softly, his voice pained and broken (_broken, broken, like everything else, broken_). "We've already been over this. Everything I have—everything I gave up, all the things I could have done—it's all useless, it's all pointless if…if I don't have you. You are the most important thing to me. Not MedAcad, not Osiris."

"Illogical. Can't be quantified." River peeks through the curtain of hair at him, studies his hands. Strong and pale, with long, nimble fingers. Doctor hands. Simon. _Who is she? _Not a girl, not River. Not anymore. She is defective; her parts do not operate correctly.

"Not everything has to be quantified, River."

This is a factor she has never considered before. For a long moment, she is quiet. Words threaten to spill out of her mouth in a flood, tumbling over one another until nothing makes sense and the world dissolves into a vortex of needles and pain and fear. She is afraid of what will come out when she opens her mouth, afraid because the data can no longer be extrapolated to a sufficient degree and River cannot predict the outcome of this situation. Not anymore, not now that she is broken. A wild card, inapplicable. _Girl_.

Finally: "Why?"

Simon looks at her for a minute, sadness and empathy waging a war in his eyes, and he knows that she is not talking about quantification. Then he pulls her into his arms—and River's tense muscles start to unwind, even if it's just a little bit, and slowly the fog begins to clear, because Simon is home and he is safe and he will always be there for her. People are illogical. They defy the laws of probability, and live in a world of contradictions and confusing emotions.

Sometimes River feels like she's floating, watching the scene play out from above. She cannot relate, cannot understand humans and their motivations because she is trapped in this fog, and sometimes things come out of her and she doesn't know what they mean. But Simon calms her. Whenever she is floating, whenever she loses her grip on reality and her mind is trapped in the false memories and the flashbacks and the dreams that she cannot separate from waking, she can find herself in him, even if it's just a fleeting glimpse of who she used to be. He tethers her to the ground, inexplicably retaining his foolish hope that she is not shattered, that her cracks can be glued together to make _whole River _again.

"You're my sister," he finally answers.

_Girl. River. Broken. _The names and definitions pile up, assigned to her by the foolish fickle fancies of humanity. The world is simpler without speech, when ideas can be expressed without the cumbersome tool of language. This new River cannot express her thoughts adequately using these tools, cannot make herself understood to Simon and the others. Her world is confusing, but Simon is a bright point of clarity in the darkness.

She adds another word to her list of definitions. _Sister._


End file.
